00:00NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark,
00:05detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang,
00:12the farthest individual star ever seen to date.
00:17The newly detected star is 12.9 billion light-years away,
00:21meaning that the light took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth.
00:25The previous record was 9 billion light-years away.
00:30Normally, at these distances, entire galaxies look like small, dim smudges
00:35with the light from millions of stars blending together.
00:39But the galaxy hosting this star was magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing
00:45into a long crescent that astronomers named the Sunrise Arc.
00:49Gravitational lensing occurs when a tremendous mass warps the fabric of space,
00:54creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light
01:00from distant objects behind it.
01:03The combined mass of a foreground group of galaxies created a lens
01:07that allowed astronomers to see this distant star.
01:11After studying the galaxy in detail,
01:13they determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star that they called Arendelle,
01:19which means Morning Star in Old English.
01:23The research team estimates that Arendelle is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun
01:28and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known.
01:33Arendelle existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials
01:38as the stars around us today.
01:41Studying Arendelle will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with,
01:46but that led to everything we know today.
01:52NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
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